I've been getting a good response to my recent column about whether you should try to correct the misbehavior of other people's children.

Peggy Post Senning, one of Emily Post's four great-grandchildren and a director for the Emily Post Institute, told me that from an etiquette standpoint, it's best not to confront parents about their children's behavior in public. If you feel something needs to be done, it's better to speak to some other person in authority, such as the store manager.

She also said a stranger can't expect to change children's behavior long-term. They learn their manners, or lack of manners, at home.

I'll be following up on some of the reactions, which included a restaurant manager who isn't crazy about being expected to keep unruly brats in line. But in the meantime, I'll share one horror story.

The Great Allentown Fair opens tonight, and I'll be there for my traditional tour on Preview Night. I'll also be helping to judge the Hershey Cake cooking contest in Agricultural Hall at 7 p.m. Stop by for a free sample at the end.

The absence of Yocco's this year is depressing, but if I can still walk after sampling a couple of dozen chocolate cakes, I'll head up to Vince's for my traditional opening night cheesesteak, which certainly will ease my disappointment. I just hope it stops raining.

I think the fair would make a great setting for a future episode of "My Name is Earl," one of the best new TV shows last season. I'm thinking that one of the names on Earl's list -- if you don't watch the show, I'll just say that he is giving himself good karma by trying to correct all the bad things he has done in his life, which is a lot -- could be a guy whom he somehow drove into becoming a carney. This victim would be appearing at the fair as Bobo, which would give him the opportunity to insult Earl and his friends. Eventually Earl would help him get a better job, and maybe agree to appear as Bobo himself until the carnival operator can find a replacement.

As I read back over that, I realize it's a really good idea. I hope nobody at NBC reads this blog before I have the opportunity to send them a script.

Speaking of TV, Jaime Pressly, who plays Earl's slutty ex-wife Joy on the show, was robbed in Sunday's night's Emmy's. Nominated for best supporting actress in a comedy series, she lost to Megan Mullally of the extreeeeemely tired "Will and Grace." Enough already. I hate the same old same old of these Emmy award winners. Monk. The Amazing Race. Alan Alda. Barry Manilow! How about acknowledging something fresh and different for once?

Another thing. "Elizabeth I" kept winning awards in the miniseries category, and it was unwatchable. I know, because I tried. Awful.

Still, the worst thing in the Emmy show was the interminable deification of the late schlockmeister Aaron Spelling. The requisite clipfest was fine, but SIX droning monologues about how wonderful he was? The only entertainment value was speculating on the enormous plastic surgeon bills racked up by the semi-embalmed Charlie's Angels, and on how many muskrats were killed to create Joan Collins' wig.

That's not to say there weren't any high points. Conan O'Brien is a terrific host. Bob Newhart, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Hugh Laurie were really funny. The tribute to Dick Clark was nice. And a few actors and shows I like actually won awards.

But it got me to thinking about some of my favorite TV characters who weren't even nominated. Eccentrics all, these are people who command the screen every time they're on, even when it's not very often. They are:

-- Tim Gunn of "Project Runway." This guy is the heart and soul of that very entertaining program, which I think should have been a close runnerup to "American Idol" for best reality show. I know, Heidi Klum is supposed to be the star, and she's beautiful, but she really isn't very interesting. Gunn, as the odd but lovable camp counselor, holds the show together.

-- Chloe of "24." This show needs all the comic relief it can get, and Chloe has plenty to spare. She is the absolute master of facial expressions that say "Are You Crazy?" "What, Are You Stupid?" "Get Lost, Can't You See I'm Busy Saving the World?" and "What Am I Doing Here?" She even has gone Rambo when necessary, blowing away bad guys like no computer geek you've ever seen. Outside of Jack Bauer, she's the most indispensable character on the show.

-- Dwight of "The Office." Hey, he has his own bobblehead. This is one of those guys who doesn't really have to say anything. You just look at him, and you start laughing. The show's full of funny characters, but I think he's the best.

-- Bridgette of "Medium." This kid, the butterball middle daughter of psychic Alison DuBois, always looks like an unmade bed, but she has personality to spare. When she gets belligerent and puts her hands on her hips, she's kind of a bizarro Shirley Temple.

-- Paulie from "The Sopranos." The perfect psycho mobster killer. I particularly like that "Bride of Frankenstein" thing he has going with his hair. My favorite Paulie moment was when he hung that awful painting of Tony and his horse over his fireplace, admiring it like it was a Gainsborough.

I'm stuck running The Morning Call's Easton office today, and I've been too swamped to craft much of a posting, so I'll just give you some odds and ends. I'm off the rest of this week, so you won't hear from me again until next Monday.

The summer hiatus from TV series-watching officially ended for me last night with the season premiere of "Prison Break," an awesome show on Fox. It was another great episode, and if you haven't been watching, I encourage you to check it out.

The new show that followed, "Vanished," seemed kind of hokey to me, sort of a really poor man's "24." In fact, I detected ticking a few times. Maybe it will get better, but I doubt it.

My column Wednesday will include a few comments about "Snakes on a Plane," which I saw last week and will be seeing again tonight (Hey, my daughter wanted to go, so what's a good dad to do?) I'll probably only go see it 5 or 6 more times.

This is one of those movies that will seem lousy if you wait to see it on video, but is enormously entertaining in the theater, where you're sharing the experience with a bunch of other screaming, groaning, laughing, retching (just kidding) people. I heartily recommend it.

Finally, since I've been writing about animal shelters, I'll share a link to a pretty depressing video on the subject of abandoned and abused dogs and cats. It's very well done, and it makes a powerful point, but it's not exactly the feel good movie of the summer. It's at the Web site Brightlion.com.

Most of you readers probably think I’m a lovable sort of lug. Kind to animals, drive around looking at Christmas lights, eat a lot.

But believe it or not, there are people out there who really dislike me -- or at least get nervous whenever I show up. An Allentown councilwoman saw me walking into their meeting a couple of years ago and muttered to her colleagues, “This can’t be good.” I get that a lot.

A good example was my recent interview with Bruce Fritch, longtime executive director of the Lehigh County Humane Society.

For example, as a result of my column and blogs (here and here) about my tour of the Gettysburg battlefield, I heard from a Quakertown woman who said her brother is buried in the national cemetery there. She said she’s been visiting him there for 57 years.

With typical brilliance, I surmised that he didn’t lose his life in the Civil War. So what’s he doing in that cemetery? I had always assumed it was the final resting place only for people who died in the battle.

In fact, veterans from all this country’s major wars and conflicts are buried at Gettysburg, although the National Park Service Web site says it’s closed now to new burials.

There are many very weighty subjects I should be blogging about today, but I find myself hopelessly preoccupied with this amazing blog, known as the Comics Curmudgeon.

The blogger reproduces newspaper comic strips and comments on them, sardonically. These include many of your favorite strips from The Morning Call, including "Get Fuzzy" (he tries to explain why he loves it), "For Better or For Worse" (he seems to sort of like it) and "Mark Trail" (he laughs at it). You can even delve into his archives to get his comments on past Mark Trails and other strips. (No sign of the hated "Girls and Sports," by the way, which I suspect speaks to its irrelevance.)

I got an e-mail this morning about this blog, and it pretty much destroyed any hope of productivity. I've been sitting here reading all day, grinning, chuckling, even laughing out loud. I'm particularly amused that the Curmudgeon and his commenters make the same kinds of wisecracks that my friends and I do about the absurdity of Mark Trail -- my favorite strip, as longtime readers know -- and other comic strip characters.

I even got a bonus when I was directed to the Deadspin blog, where I was introduced to the Mark Trail Drinking Game.

Deadspin and many Mark Trail fans have noticed cartoonist Jack Elrod's fondness for placing the voice balloon next to random animals in the foreground. As nearly as I can tell, he does this because he really likes drawing animals, even though in many cases they bear absolutely no relationship to what's actually happening in a strip.

This odd juxtaposition of animal and dialogue inevitably gives the impression both that the animals can talk and that they're enormous. If you're a novice Mark Trail fan or haven't experienced it before, this is one of many endearing traits you should watch for. My favorite of recent vintage involved Mark talking to his editor in a big city restaurant -- and one panel dominated by a squirrel perched on a branch, with the city's skyline in the distant background. "But they are undermanned and underfunded, and the smugglers are smart and well-funded!" the squirrel appears to be remarking.

Anyway, the idea of the Mark Trail Drinking Game is that you down a shot of liquor every time one of these giant talking animals appears. Deadspin writes, "You'll be a hopeless drunk by Labor Day."

In the course of writing about litterers Monday, I mentioned an Allentown sign shark who pulls down illegal advertising signs such as “WORK AT HOME” or “I LOST 40 POUNDS IN 2 WEEKS.”

The company responsible for many of these signs at the height of the street spam scourge, Herbalife International, decided four years ago to dispense with this form of marketing, and there has been a dramatic change.

Still, there are plenty of advertising signs on utility polls or busy intersections. I wrote last year about a tiff between local sign shark Keith Helfrich and 1-800-GOTJUNK, a franchise business whose signs can be seen in this area.

"We were following a black Mercedes 5500 on Wyandotte Hill going toward Bethlehem for Musikfest on Friday, Aug. 11. Guy and a girl in the car. Guy was driving kind of jerky, kept stopping and starting, and we noticed he was drinking something out of a big cup.

"Then he tosses the cup out the window! This always outrages me, so I thought I'd write down his license number: (Pennsylvania plate)."

"I am hoping that you can tell me if my eyes were deceiving me yesterday at Musikfest (August 10). On the alley between Donegal Square and Liederplatz were some porta-potties being manned by Habitat for Humanity. I was given a handi-wipe by a man who sure looked like and sounded like President Carter (or maybe his son, or at least a relative). I sent my husband to have a look and he agreed the man looked like him but said 'too young looking,' plus he did not hear the man speak. What do you think?"

I saw "Captain Blood" on TV the other night for the first time in years.

I loved this swashbuckling Errol Flynn movie when I was a kid. In fact, I recall that I went to the library and got out "Captain Blood" and "The Sea Hawk," both Rafael Sabatini novels converted into Errol Flynn movies. I think I was in elementary school, so they were over my head, but I plowed through them anyway.

"Captain Blood" was just as amazing as I remembered it. Flynn makes a great hero, Olivia de Havilland is a perfect love interest (for the first of many times), and Flynn gets to skewer Basil Rathbone, a great villain, in a sword fight. I've read where Rathbone was the far superior swordsman, but it didn't do him any good in his movie roles. Flynn later killed him again in an even more memorable sword duel in "The Adventures of Robin Hood."

Anyway, seeing this movie, and the recent success of "Pirates of the Caribbean," got me to wondering whether "Captain Blood" was the best pirate movie ever.

Some guy tried to start a discussion on the Internet about the best pirate movie, but the ones he threw out there -- "Hook," "The Princess Bride" and "Cutthroat Island" -- were idiotic choices. "Princess Bride" was the best of that bunch, but it hardly was a pirate movie. "Cutthroat Island" was a terrible bomb, and "Hook's" pirate ship never left the dock.

"Pirates of the Caribbean?" I saw the first one, and I thought it was entertaining and muddled. I suspect the second one is more of the same.

I remember a movie called "The Buccaneer," starring Yul Brynner as Jean Lafitte. It was pretty good, but I found myself distracted by Brynner's wig. He looked ridiculous.

Some of other pirate movies that I'm told were good, but that I never saw, include Tyrone Power in "The Black Swan," Burt Lancaster in "The Crimson Pirate" and Gene Kelly in "The Pirate."

Then there's "Treasure Island." The version I remember best starred Robert Newton, who seemed to specialize in being a pirate, In fact, I think he may be responsible for the whole "Aaarrggh, Maties" school of pirate dialect. I've seen him in other stuff, but he always looked out of place unless he could say things like "avast."

I'd have to say my No. 2 choice behind "Captain Blood" would be "The Sea Hawk," where Flynn is a privateer. He beats up on the Spaniards in that one.

I'm going to the Phillies-Reds game Saturday night, and believe it or not, I've never been to Citizens Bank Park.

Does anyone have recommendations about the best things to eat there? I'm mostly a beer, peanuts and hot dog guy, but I make an exception when there's something special in one of these newer parks. I had some excellent barbecue at Manny Sanguillen's stand in PNC Park, Pittsburgh, for example -- and I got an autograph to boot.

Asking other people for food suggestions is an unusual position for me, but hey, I'm not proud.

It's a testament to my conscientiousness that I am writing this last blog entry now, when what I really want to do is slump over on my desk.

I had my beer, and it actually went pretty well. But when I followed that up with a giant Reese's Pieces Sundae, it wiped me out. As I struggled through this monstrosity under the tent at Festplatz, some polka band added insult to my misery with its white-belt rendition of "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll."

Still, I somehow managed to not only finish my sundae, but eat more ice cream before I lumbered back up Main Street to our office. Only Americaplatz remains, and my one-day solo record is well within reach.

At this point, I should be easy to recognize. There are food stains all over my shirt.

You'll have to wait for my column Wednesday to get all the details, but here are a few early glimpses into my world at Musikfest.

-- On stage at Plaza Tropical, they're playing classic music on the piano. At my table nearby, I'm slobbering down a Gator Po-Boy.

Where else could you juxtapose Brahms, Liszt and an alligator sandwich?

-- I was joined on the first leg of my eating quest by Northampton County councilman/radio host/Hall of Famer Ron Angle. We were supposed to be meeting by Musikfest's Kim Plyler, but she begged off at the last minute.

It was a good move on her part. I think Angle was getting sick watching me in action. By the time he was finished his dainty soup and drink, I already was through my fifth stop and eyeing up some alligator meat.

-- I don't know if it will make the final cut, but I had the idea of quoting from the great "Saturday Night Live" sketch featuring Christopher Walken, Will Ferrell and "more cowbell." While you're out there working your butts off, I'm here laughing over the video. What a great job I have.

I dressed this morning in comfortable, very loose-fitting clothing, although it probably won't be loose by the end of the day. I even skipped breakfast.

Someone asked me this morning if I starve myself for a couple of days leading up to this. I've found that's counterproductive. It's better to stretch your stomach in advance by eating a lot.

As usual, I'll be starting in Volksplatz around noon with a culinary blitzkreig, then work my way back up the hill before my annual midafternoon beer at Liederplatz, typically the point of the day where I'm most bloated.

I'm in disguise, so if you're out at Musikfest today, you won't recognize me, but I'll blog throughout the day to let you know how I'm making out.

Most of the bloggers seemed to enjoy the collective plug, although I only had space to mention a handful of the local ones. But the guy who writes the Shoe-Fly Pie blog apparently was offended by my one-paragraph disclaimer about the potential for irresponsible blogging. Read through his posts and you'll find several digs at me in particular and the professional media in general.

This is the hottest day I can remember. I just got back from my customary noontime walk around Bethlehem, and I look like somebody threw me in a pool. You could fry scrapple on the sidewalk.

Luckily, this is the week every year when I transport myself to seaside locales in South Africa, Australia and California, where I can vicariously feel the ocean spray on my face and a swaying deck under my feet. When I settle into my easy chair every evening, I leave the overpaved environs of the sweltering Lehigh Valley far behind.

It's Shark Week.

For 51 weeks of the year, I visit the Discovery Channel only sporadically. A "Deadliest Catch" here, a "Mythbusters" there. Good stuff, but usually not enough to drag me away from sports and movies.

But when "Shark Week" arrives, other TV goes on hold. I can't get enough of great whites, chum and shark cages.

My fascination with sharks predates the arrival of the first Shark Week a couple of decades ago. As a kid, I read everything I could get on sharks. I'll never forget the excitement and horror I felt as I pored over a series of photos in Life magazine about an underwater movie shoot in which a bull shark attacked a cameraman in a series of gory photos. This thing grabbed him right around the chest.

I didn't find out until a few years ago that the whole thing had been a hoax. By then, I was a full-grown sharkaholic. (For some more recent hoax shark photos, check here and here.)

My son followed in my footsteps, thanks to a childhood full of bedtime stories about how to evade shark attack and how to tell one species from another. His old bookshelf still is full of shark books.

What amazes me every year about Shark Week is how inventive they are about finding new ways to bring the subject to life. Already this week, I've watched "Air Jaws" great whites in South Africa, leaping into the air and crashing back to the surf. An autopsy on a huge tiger shark. Hair-rising first-person accounts and recreations of shark attacks. Impressive demonstrations of shark repellant. Computer-aided speculation about giant prehistoric sharks. In-depth analysis of the strategies employed by seals and sharks in the Ring of Death. A profile of the Long Island shark hunter after whom Quint was modeled in "Jaws."

And the week's not even half over. I don't care if it's hot. Life is good.

I’ve been writing about my recent six-hour tour of the Gettysburg National Military Park with Jeff Davis, who moved to Gettysburg after retirement specifically so he could study and help preserve the battlefield.

I ran a column Saturday about our trip, and Monday I wrote a blog entry about a monument to Sallie, a regimental dog whose devotion is one of many moving stories of those awful three days in July 1863. Still, I’ve barely scratched the surface, as you might imagine.

You’ll have to forgive my enthusiasm on this subject. Davis, who accepts no compensation for his occasional tours, does them only for family, friends and the occasional tourist he finds wandering aimlessly. I was really lucky.